After months of planning, we have launched the “Combo of the Month Club,” a loyalty strategy for a restaurant chain with the alleged good fortune to be one of our clients. I am pleased to report that people are gleefully signing up, and in much greater numbers than we’d anticipated.

We designed the Club to give members an incentive to visit the restaurants more often and to try new menu items. That much alone should both pay for the program and increase incremental sales and, therefore, profits.

Better still, the program enables us to collect names, birth dates, addresses and email addresses of people who like the chain and have expressed a willingness to interact. That means our client can send messages straight to the very people most likely to want them.